


i won’t run far (i can always be found)

by moonbeatblues



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: F/F, M/M, Multi, as it is now their re-incarnations are:, beau: half-elf wyvern rider, but it has a better ending!!, caleb: human onomastic wizard, fjord: orc farmer, jester: changeling traveler, nott: halfling trader, sevri is the name of beau’s wvyern. to be clear., this one’s sad and i’m sorry, yasha: gnome(?) champion of kord
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-16
Updated: 2020-02-23
Packaged: 2021-02-27 06:54:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,586
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22282933
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moonbeatblues/pseuds/moonbeatblues
Summary: the luxon can be a curious thing. so much humor, for a non-deity, a non-consciousness.(from a tumblr prompt: “Hey, what about consecuted Nein for the prompt thing-y? Like all of them are consecuted and meeting again after reincarnation”)
Relationships: Beauregard & Caduceus Clay & Fjord & Jester Lavorre & Nott & Caleb Widogast & Yasha, Beauregard Lionett & Mollymauk Tealeaf, Caduceus Clay/Fjord, Jester Lavorre & The Traveler, Jester Lavorre/Beauregard Lionett, Veth Brenatto/Yeza Brenatto, more to be added? shadowgast i think
Comments: 7
Kudos: 117





	1. fjord, beau, and jester

**Author's Note:**

> title is from the other side of mt. heart attack by liars— it has big m9 vibes

the luxon can be a curious thing. so much humor, for a non-deity, a non-consciousness.

—

fjord.

—

it’s not a good harvest. amma says it’s alright to let something go when it wants to go, but he pulls on his waders anyway, goes trudging out to collect what they can.

winters are always pallid, the same grey sky falling into mist among the hills, sitting squat and heavy over the fields.

the bog tugs at his shoes, like it’s trying to draw him downward, and there’s that feeling again, like summer lightning. it burns in his nose, sweeps his heels out from under him, and when he goes down on his back in the mud and water there’s a moment where it closes over his head and yellow flashes behind his screwed-tight eyelids, like a flurry of eyes opening all at once.

he sits up and tries to breathe for a long moment, exhales pushing the fog away so minutely the motion isn’t even visible. there are a few myrweed leaves snagged on his tusks, and he pulls them off and chews them, wringing out his long braids.

amma’s right, they taste all wrong, sour and not earthy. when it hits again, he’s ready— it was with food, first, in fall when he was sick and amma made him soup; watching the steam rise, he blinked and suddenly amma’s hands were smaller, frosted with soft pink hair and holding out a cup full of something dark and fruit-smelling. love curled in his chest so warm it burned, and when he looked up and it was amma’s face again, tears ran down his face so fast and sudden he could hardly breathe, and bent over coughing, happy and sad and confused meeting in his head like the sound of metal on metal.

the taste of the leaves gets sweet again in his mouth, and as he chews he can feel that his tusks are smaller, and funny-shaped, like he’d done something to them. he keeps his eyes closed to keep it from fading, and voices start to swell in his ears, familiar things, friendly bickering things. there’s a hand on his shoulder, then two, four.

‘ford?’ someone says, and the lilt in their voice is something he’s only ever heard from the traveling merchants, the ones he’d still tower over if they stood on each other’s shoulders. ‘ford?’

he opens his eyes. the sky is grey and flat, and the water is soaking into his waders. he’s crying again.

—

beauregard.

—

“it’s okay to be afraid,” sevri says. “but we’re ready. you know we are.”

“i’m not afraid,” she says. “just cold,” and shivers for effect.

“liar. you always run hot—“ and this funny blurry thing happens where it’s sevri’s voice, in her head like it has been since they were paired, but it’s also someone else with this paint-thick accent, and they speak in unison— “ _like a furnace_.”

“what?” she says, and stumbles back, against the wall. 

“i said you run hot.” sevri gets close to her face, beady red eyes squinting. “seriously, are you going to be okay?”

sevri’s eyes never seemed strange before, but all of a sudden they remind her of someone else’s and there’s this fuzzy pain in her chest, like how she could cry about mama’s wyvern but not mama. like the sadness was too big for her and just stuck in her throat.

“i don’t—“ she says. “do you ever remember people you’ve never met?”

sevri’s quiet for a long moment, craning her long neck to look out the mouth of the cave, where the moons are starting to rise and where the snow is dusting down like falling stars.

“not every egg hatches,” she says. “my mother used to say that she could hear her sisters, at night.”

“and you?”

“i don’t know. something maybe, in the dark. i wonder if they’re angry with me.”

and, well, she’s not sure what to say to that. they watch the moons crest for a while until the horns start to peal down below, and then a little longer.

“do you think they can see us? when we fly, i mean, since the moon’s out.”

she’s not sure, but she thinks about it for a moment, what they’d look like so far up, a blur of silver and trailing, swirling red in the night. beautiful, for sure, even if she never feels like it up close. 

she doesn’t know if the weaver ever gifts her sight, but on nights like these it’s nice to imagine. 

“yeah.”

—

jester.

—

she’s finally learning how to sail the damn thing.

it’s the first quiet night in a while, and the first one she spends out on the deck instead of below, watching the prow cut smoothly, sail caught on the wind from three days ago. she’s never read a book on sailing, or met a sailor, and had never seen the ocean before this, but she does not think it should be this easy.

“how much of this is you?”

there’s a telling shift in the sail. “just the wind.”

“you never answered my question.”

he says nothing for a long moment. “i think you know where we are going.”

she does. it’s the other reason she’s still up— in the dark, with only the smell of salt and the push and drag of the waves on the sides of the cabin for sensation, it’s been happening again. 

dreams of being on the ocean, deep in the belly of something much larger than the skiff he’d helped her steal from the village right where the river opened into the bay. (she itched to stay a little— it’s been _so long_ since she’s talked to anyone else, tried on a new face— but they needed to keep moving, he’d said.)

in her dreams she’s sleeping next to someone and is unafraid of it. in her dreams she slides out of the bed, wobbles a little with the rocking of the ship— much larger, she’s never been on the ocean before but she has to remember _why they’re here_ and that it doesn’t _matter_ if she’s afraid because this isn’t _about_ her— and goes out onto the much larger deck.

the stars are different. she is unafraid of it.

there is someone out on the prow, and a light, growing brighter, growing blinding.

the person on the prow turns, and she wakes to the rolling of the boat and the snap of a sail refilling with strange wind.

“you have been alone for so long. you should remember nothing else, and yet you do. don’t you want to know why?”

“i don’t know,” she says. the moon is full and lovely overhead, and she can see the blur of her own face in the water as they move, the pale skin, the paler hair, the eyes paler still. she closes her eyes and tears build, stingy and hot.

she has never liked to look at herself. it has always felt wrong.

“do you remember me?” he asks, after a long silence. the sail empties and folds down again, and the boat slows to a crawl. he sounds sad.

“no,” she says, and the indistinct edges of her face in the water change, become softer.

“you know, i have always been the patron of those who wear masks,” he says. “their guardian. their friend.”

there’s a sudden dip to the prow, and she knows he is sitting beside her, watching the reflection.

“this is your favorite face, no? your first?”

and it was. when he’d first come to her, and told her to imagine that she was someone else, she’d imagined this, like drops of color into still water, blooming suddenly, blue and dark.

“do you know who it is?” she asks, voice raw. tears stream openly down her face, and she is afraid. her face in the water has purple eyes.

the boat stops completely, and the water clears further. the sea should not be this still, she thinks, not ever.

“yes.”


	2. caleb and frumpkin

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> caleb and frumpkin, in two different worlds

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> imagine the second/alternate world as like the rhizome from the end of spring in hieron. it's not meant to be a later iteration, just a different one.

_the true name of an archfey is never something given. it cannot be taken forcefully, not by any means understood._

_it is believed the name of an archfey, if written, will blind the reader, or burn the paper._

_there is no record of an archfey’s name being learned, nor successfully documented, nor remembered. it defies the charmless nature of the fair folk, to divest control. to acquiesce. to give._

_to trust._

there is a cat at his window.

he opens it— inward, thankfully, and the thing leaps down and onto his desk without hesitating.

it’s raining something terrible outside— he yelps when the cat waltzes towards his open textbook, he doesn’t have the gold to buy his own, doesn’t have the gold to pay the library for a replacement— but it only sniffs at the page for a long moment. longer, he thinks, than it would take to get the scent of old paper and standard ink.

there’s a flash that he thinks at first is lightning— he hadn’t smelled ozone on the air, strange, even stranger for winter— watching the cat nose at his book, it’s like the room spins, not around _him_ but around _it_.

for a moment, the cat is the same, same long, too-groomed orange fur, but the book it’s inspecting is a smaller thing, a scribbled-in thing.

like the cat, a familiar, well-loved thing.

his fingers itch for it.

then, the cat looks back up and the book is a monolith once again, a monument to things he has yet to learn.

he presses one hand flat to his collarbone— _onomancy is the most patient of the schools,_ the scholar incumbent writes, _it requires dedication rather than talent. a wild heart drowns out the truth._

it’s funny, how the first example of the incumbent onomastic (11th edition) is one’s own name, how to draw on it to extend oneself outward. how there’s no margin on _what to do when your own name doesn’t work. what to do if you go to the library and your name’s on the card and all your slips, and the mailbox and your mother’s tongue when she calls you for dinner, but you start to think it isn’t yours._

_could it be the mark of a wild heart?_

he reaches out for the cat and it arches into it, tail sweeping lazily through his open hand.

“what’s your name, i wonder?” ( _the true name of an archfey is never something given…._ )

the cat’s eyes are like fire.

( _….there is no record of an archfey’s name being learned….._ )

his heart stutters frantically in his chest, but he can’t hear it at all.

( _….it defies the charmless nature of the fair folk…._ )

_my name is frumpkin._

( _….to trust._ )

—

“we have a long way to go, little one.”

“i know, i know,” he says, and runs to catch up. “but look at all of these, aren’t they fascinating?”

the cat turns to watch him scramble over tree roots so big they run into one another across the path and vie for space, wrestle and merge.

the boy— no, that’s not right, not anymore, when did that happen— is stuffing more flora into his satchel. as he catches up, he presents a handful of moss like a prize.

“i’ve never seen this kind before, have you?”

he has. cupped in the not-boy’s hands is a clump of bright pink lichen, the sort that might climb a staff, if allowed. like coral, if coral grew on trees.

“no.”

the not-boy gasps. “then that’s even more reason to gather some! i wonder if i can get it to grow in the enclosure—“

“caleb. we will not be going home for a long while.”

(so funny, isn’t it, that that would be his name. the luxon is such a funny thing, or perhaps the web of reality grows thin in places. perhaps it’s easier to remember the name you choose to keep, over time.)

caleb wilts a little, looks at the ground.

“i know.”

he’s so much the same and so much not, all at once. two lifetimes of too much undertaking for one so young.

the cat approaches.

“give it here. i’ll keep it for you until we get somewhere you can grow it.”

“really?”

oh, the things he would not do for this one.

“yes. it will be safe.”

“okay, but you have to keep it damp enough, and out of too much light, and—“

“ _caleb_. it will be safe.” there is a large tree that fell in his forest last year, and it’s patchworking itself over with strange little symbiotic things, things he wouldn’t perhaps have taken such notice of, if not for this caleb.

“okay.”

he places it on the ground reluctantly. there is a light that spreads from where the cat noses at the lichen, and then it and the cat are gone and the boy is alone, dwarfed by the trees, one hand still clutching at his bag.

(in his forest, he takes a moment to examine the lichen— a persistent, lovely thing. the firbolg would be proud of his work.

he drapes it over a bare spot on the trunk, reaches out and feels the tree accept it, feels it anchor and start to grow.

he looks back at the house. the sky is shifting a soft pink and orange overhead.

from the trellis, a few things catch the breeze. a hanging planter full of camellia, a blue ribbon tied to one of the rafters.

a necklace with a large pendant, an oval engraved with a closed eye.

this, he holds for a moment. a reminder of an old and terrible fear, now benign. forgotten.

he knows caleb will remember, in time, but, for his sake, he hopes caleb does not remember everything.

he takes the ribbon instead.)

“i am sorry to make you wait,” the cat says. “i brought you a gift.”

caleb holds it up in a pocket of thready sunlight. “what is it?”

“something from an old friend. she used to tie it on her staff.”

the cat watches caleb do the same with his. it’s a simple thing, dark glossy wood knotted twice near the middle to form a natural handle, and he ties the ribbon near the top before slinging it over his back again.

he has not had to use it yet.

soon, he will.

the cat turns and begins walking, again.

“come along. this is not a safe place to stay, nor to sleep.”

“how do you know the way through, anyway?” caleb asks, running to catch up.

“you would doubt my knowledge?” the cat teases.

“no, no, i just—“

“i traveled here a long time ago. when the forest was young, and stranger still, and seemed it was on the verge of death.”

“as a cat?”

“as a cat. though i mostly sat on someone’s shoulders.”

caleb’s quiet, for a moment.

“how long do cats live?”

the cat blinks out, and reappears on caleb’s shoulders.

he’s a little too small for it, yet, and pitches forward slightly under the weight. the cat presses his head against the back of caleb’s.

“not much longer, if we don’t make it out of this forest by nightfall.”

“okay, okay!”

—

“whose shoulders did you sit on?”

“a friend’s.”

“the same friend who gave you the ribbon?”

“no. but she was there, too.”

caleb thinks on this for a little.

“are we friends?”

“yes, i think so.”

“oh.”

there’s silence, again.

“what’s your name?”

“caleb—“

“i know, all in good time, i just. i’ve never had a friend before.” he pulls out his latest notebook. “i wanted to write it down.”

(he thinks of one of the first times— not the very first, but after a long time, so long he’d thought he’d never be called again, and he’d come to in an almost entirely blank room, just a bed and a table. it was so strange, to be a cat after all that time.

caleb looked like he’d aged twenty years, not ten. he was crying.

“i remembered it,” he’d said. “the spell. i remembered.”)

the cat braces for the shock of the incoming memory, prepares to catch caleb if he falls again, like he had when they’d met.

“my name is frumpkin.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> again, i'm at @seafleece on tumblr! come yell about consecution and onomancer caleb and how frumpkin would definitely wait for caleb to be reborn and watch over him


	3. yasha and nott

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> yasha, the chosen, and veth, not so far from home

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> -yasha can use the hammer of kord as a staff because she is.. little...  
> -aidel is a reborn yeza, and they're both halflings again because they deserve it

it is known this of the stormlord, that he demands much.

or so it is said.

gods seek in their disciples a kindred spirit. the same values, the same goals, an extension of their will manifest.

or so it is said.

the champion of kord arrives at the monastery early one winter morning.

there are funny flowers that grow here in the winter, they catch the snow and hold it as water in their basin-like petals.

_long has it been since a champion of kord was chosen like this_ , the matron’s voice says in her head as she kneels down. _long has it been since a champion of kord did not fight to become so._

there had been a note of jealousy, she knew it. maybe there always would be.

_gods change_ , she thinks, and picks one.

—

they watch her from the dormitories, the younger ones, the initiates, so strange is she. she catches sight of one, an older girl with a topknot, lanky and sharp-eyed, and this flash of recognition hits her so hard her knees almost buckle and she leans heavily on her staff.

a woman in vestiges— not quite the same, they’re blue rather than grey, and more ornate, more titular— grinning at her while wiping blood from under her nose. herself, holding the woman’s hair up and carefully shearing at her undercut with the fine edge of a sword— such a large thing, especially to hold in one hand.

“madame?” someone is saying. she blinks, and it fades.

it’s the girl, rushed forward from the group of younger monks. “are you alright?”

her eyebrows are knitted together— concerned, but also curious. she wonders what they will tell themselves about her, when she leaves.

“fine,” she says, but the back of her head still feels odd, pent-up with pressure. “please, where is the sanctuary?”

—

they’re watching her from the entrance, she knows. it’s not a new feeling.

she shrugs off her coat, drapes it over her arm and into a neat fold. the sanctum here is bare— stone-hewn. a reminder of strength, but subdued. she sits peaceably on the floor, legs crossed.

the gods are cryptic, they say. they forgo words. their desires can be nebulous.

( _why? why did you change?_

he sits next to her on the balcony overlooking the cliff. the sea below is completely still. the closest resemblance to the open-postured statues of the temple, the training grounds, is the beard, lifting on the breeze, the still-proud posture. kord, the god of battle, quiet.

_a champion of mine_ , he says, _was not what i anticipated._

lightning spiderwebs over the sea, and the answering roll is somehow smooth, soft.

_her strength was a tool for others. she was taken from me, and in that time i raged storms along the coast. but in the end, she was returned gently, and for her use of strength had suffered. she feared herself._

the bracer-bound hand reaches up, splays across his own chest, over his heart.

_unpredictability hurt her. the strength she found in herself, which she used in my name, was something staid, something she was unafraid of. it brought her peace. it brought me peace._

veins of light splits the sky again and again, until the thunder feels constant. there is nothing sudden in it, somehow.

_a storm always telegraphs itself,_ he says. _the smell of the earth, the darkening of the sky. a charge always precedes lightning, and thunder always follows. it is no weakness that a storm collects itself from infinitesimal things, from collecting water. a boiling over, a release can show strength without fear, if one learns to watch for it. a storm will always end. there is solace in that._

_but why me?_

he laughs— she thinks he does, at least. it sounds just like the echo of the sky over the water.

_i sensed her in you— the same spirit, returned. maybe you will feel it too, in time. she gave me the glory of her last life in return for safety, for strength, and i lost her for a time. i will not do so again._

the hand closes on her shoulder, soft but heavy.

_my blessing is not conditional. it cannot be taken away by a lost fight. i chose her, and i chose you, and it is as strong as a victory won from the tired hands of another. you have had a lifetime to prove yourself, to break free. let this one be a rest._ )

a storm is coming. little things deep in the earth are breaking for the surface, to feel the rain. the young ones continue to watch her from the entrance to the sanctum.

_i chose you. i would choose you again. take solace._

she unfolds the coat, throws it over her shoulders again. the appearance of the hammer of kord, it is said, is a portent of a great warrior. an unstoppable force. violence, given form.

she grips the head, and rises. the polished wood of the handle end is somewhat quiet on the stone floor as she walks, out under the graying sky and toward the rain. if the monks are so reckless as to think her blasphemous for it, to use it as a staff, they do not say, only stare.

the champion of kord leaves the monastery in the afternoon. the basin-flowers are full of their melted prize, and rain it out onto the icy ground when they grow too heavy, but the storm does not refill them here. not today.

it’s moving eastward, still, across the ocean. to wildemount. she wonders if the monks there wear blue.

* * *

“you don’t think this place is weird?”

eb’s brow scrunches. he looks out along the valley spread down below, the messy patchwork roll of farmland blurred by snow. he scans the scattered shadow of the nearest village, the soft feathers of smoke this time of winter, and she knows he doesn’t see it. doesn’t feel the skittery chill that climbs her spine.

“nope.”

—

felderwin is a strange place.

if she’d asked around, why the spot where the apothecary used to be was never built over, she’d have heard— the alchemist was taken, during the war, and don’t you know it, his wife hadn’t died those years ago during that one winter. she came tearing through the stricken street to find her husband again, saw the ruins of their home, and went to get him back from across the ashkeepers, across the lines war draws up and down an unmarked country, so rigid yet so invisible.

and then, wouldn’t you know it, she saved the world, her and her friends.

but she doesn’t. know it, that is.

they’ve got a job to do.

“hey,” eb nudges her as they’re bundling the cart into their market bags, the big tassel-y ones that spread out into mats. “maybe we’ll get back in time for winter’s crest, since that family up in the fields didn’t have anything to sell. i’ll even split sixty-forty so you can buy him somethin’ nice—”

at this, of course, she elbows him in the gut, and he wheezes, already halfway into a laugh, and leans against the mule he’d been un-bridling. she’s already got aidel something anyway, had been planning to just leave it on his porch when they got back with no note.

eb doesn’t _get_ it, is the thing, okay? there’s this weird feeling she gets when she sees aidel, in her gut, like it’s slowly amassing lightning into this fizzy ball. and she thinks he feels it too.

they’ll brush hands reaching for the same mug and just— in that moment, it’s like she knows everything about him there is to know. like if he were an apple, she’d see right through to the core of him. eb doesn’t know what it’s like, to feel so close to someone all at once and just have it torn back out of you when you step away.

—

eb’s right, though, they do sell a lot faster without that orc family’s crops. she hasn’t talked much to the son— grandson? nephew?— more than a bit of haggling over price, but when they’d seen him last week, she’d swear for all the world that he looked like he was full of electricity, too. there’s a funny tinge to his eyes that reminds her of looking in aidel’s, that makes her want to look away and stare more in the same instant.

eb says he’ll handle the stall for a bit, that she can go look at the market. and, of course, to get him some food while she’s out.

felderwin has a couple different blacksmiths, and she can see the one out today, by what she does not yet know to be the ruined apothecary with a few of his scrap statues and not much else. she strays closer— there’s nothing else especially interesting, at today’s market— and then she just sort of stops.

he’s got one sculpture out that’s bigger than the others, a funny twisted thing that’s been polished until the winter sun glances off its faces like a mirror. it’s two people embracing, their foreheads touching, and the scrap that makes up their arms is out of a long, single piece that winds around and around them both, blurring the space where one becomes the other.

she’s not one for art— there’s always been work to do, and it’s never seemed worth what’s always been very limited time— but she has that funny lightning feeling in her stomach again, looking at it. like she’s not sure where she is right now, whether’s she’s standing in front of it with her mouth open like an idiot or if she’s one of the figures, curled into the other.

“who are they?” she rasps out when she regains enough faculty to feel the smith’s eyes on her.

he tells her the story— _she saved him, don’t you know, him and the whole world too_ — and by the end it feels like if she spoke she could finish it for him. when she blinks, these funny things keep flashing behind her eyes: a ship cutting across a jewel-green sea; a man with red hair so long and unkempt it’s like it drips down his head, looking at her urgently from behind a set of bars in the dark; a face she knows is hers and not hers at once, with too many teeth to count; people she has to crane her neck to look in the face but who return her gaze so fondly it almost burns.

“how much?” she asks, still raspy, and doesn’t even take in what he says, just shoves all her earnings from today in two big fistfuls towards him and runs to get the cart. this urge is sparking all over in her bones, like the big ball of lightning is racing along her limbs— to go back to that village, that foggy little hovel with the orc woman and the grandson the woman thinks is hers but isn’t, not really. to look into his eyes and see the same lightning in them. to look until he sees the same lightning in hers.

and then, to find everyone else.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i'm @seafleece on tumblr, come say hello!! just one left

**Author's Note:**

> come say hello on tumblr, i post a lot of cr writing and meta and art!! @seafleece


End file.
